Chapter 9 – The Stranded Neptune

Like a huge broken-backed lizard, a derelict conveyer crossed the dunes, winding off toward the hidden sea. Ransom changed course as he approached it, and set off over the open table of shallow salt-basins that extended eastwards along the coast. He moved in and out of the swells, following the long gradients that carried the pool under its own momentum. His erratic course also concealed his original point of departure. Half a mile ahead, when he passed below a second conveyer, a stout bearded man watched him from one of the gantries, honing a whalebone spear. Ransom ignored him and continued on his way.

Below him a semicircle of derelict freighters rose from the saltflats. Around them, like the hovels erected against the protective walls of a medieval fortress, was a clutter of small shacks and out-buildings. Some, like Ransom's, were built from the bodies of old cars salvaged from the beach, but others were substantial wood and metal huts, equipped with doors and glass windows, joined together by companionways of galvanized iron. Gray smoke lifted from the chimneys, conveying an impression of quiet warmth and industry. A battery of ten large stills on the fore-shore discharged its steam toward the distant hills.

A wire drift fence enclosed the settlement. As Ransom approached the western gate, he could see the open surfaces of the huge water reservoirs and breeding tanks. Each was some two hundred feet long, buttressed by embankments of sand and shingle. A team of men, heads down in the cold sunlight, were working silently in one of the tanks, watched from the bank by an overseer holding a stave. Although three hundred people lived together in the settlement, no one moved around the central compound. As Ransom knew from his previous visits, its only activity was work.

Ransom steered his pool over to the gateway, where a few huts gathered around the watchtower. Two women sat in a doorway, rocking an anemic child. At various points along the perimeter of the settlement a few subcommunities had detached themselves from the main compound, either because they were the original occupants of the site or were too lazy or unreliable to fit into the puritan communal life. However, all of them possessed some special skill with which they paid for their places.

Bullen, the gatekeeper, who peered at Ransom from his sentrybox below the watchtower, carved the paddles used by the sea-trappers. In long racks by the huts the narrow blades, wired together from pieces of whalebone, dried in the sunlight. In return, Bullen had been granted proprietary rights to the gateway. A tall, hunchbacked man with a sallow bearded face, he watched Ransom suspiciously, then walked slowly across the waterlogged hollows below the tower.

"Back again?" he said. Despite the infrequency of his visits, Ransom seemed to worry him in some obscure way, part of the general withdrawal of the settlement from the world outside. He pointed down at Ransom's pool with a paddle. "What have you got there?"

"I want to see Captain Hendry," Ransom said.

Grudgingly, Bullen released the gate. As Ransom steered the pool forwards, Bullen held it back with his paddle. Taking the hint, Ransom swept several bladefuls of the water into the basin by the tower. Usually Bullen would have expected a pair of small herring at the least, but from his brief glance at Ransom's appearance he seemed to accept that these few gallons of water were the limit of his wealth.

As the gate closed behind him, Ransom set off toward the compound. The largest of the freighters, its bows buried under the salt, formed the central tower of the settlement. Part of the starboard side, facing the shore, had been dismantled and a series of two- and three-story cabins had been built onto the decks. The stern castle of the ship, jutting high into the air, was topped by a large whalebone cross, and was the settlement's chapel. The portholes and windows had been replaced by primitive stained-glass images of biblical scenes, in which Christ and his disciples were surrounded by leaping fish and sea horses.

The settlement's preoccupation with the sea and its creatures could be seen at a glance. Outside every hut, dozens of small fish dried on trestle tables or hung from the eaves. Larger fish, groupers and sharks that had strayed into the shallow water, were suspended from the rails of the ships, while an immense swordfish, the proudest catch of the settlement and the Reverend Johnstone's choice of a militant symbol to signify its pride, was tied to the whalebone mast and hung below the cross, its huge blade pointed heavenwards.

On the seaward side of the ships, a second team of men was working in one of the tanks, bending in the cold water as they harvested the edible kelp. Swathed in rubber tubing, they looked like primitive divers experimenting with makeshift suits in the shallow water.

Directly below the gangway of the freighter half a dozen round basins had been cut in the salt dunes, temporary storage tanks for people moving with their water up and down the coast. Ransom steered his pool into the second of them, next to a visiting fisherman selling his wares to one of the foremen. The two men argued together, stepping down into the water and feeling the plump plaice and soles.

Ransom drove his paddle into the sand by his pool. Half the water had been lost on the way, and there was barely enough to cover the floor of the basin.

He called up to the look-out on the bridge: "Is Captain Hendry aboard? Ransom to see him."

The man came down the companionway to the deck, and beckoned Ransom after him. They walked past the boarded-up portholes. Unpainted for ten years, the hulk was held together by little more than the tatters of rust. The scars of shellfire marked the decks and stanchions-the freighter, loaded with fresh water and supplies, had been stormed by the insurgents breaking out from the rear areas of the beach, and then shelled from the destroyer now reclining among the dunes a hundred yards away. Through one of these tears, gaping like an empty flower in the deck overhead, Ransom could see an old surplice drying in the sun.

"Wait here. I'll see the Captain."

Ransom leaned on the rail, looking down at the yard below. An old woman in a black shawl chopped firewood with an ax, another straightened the kelp drying on a frame in the sunlight. The atmosphere in the settlement was drab and joyless, like that of an early pilgrim community grimly held together on the edge of some northern continent. Partly this was due to the vague sense of remorse still felt by the survivors-the specters of the thousands who had been killed on the beaches, or driven out in herds to die in the sea, haunted the bitter salt. But it also reflected the gradual attrition of life, the slow reduction of variety and movement as the residues of their past lives, the only materials left to them, sank into the -sterile dunes. This sense of diminishing possibility, of the erosion of all time and space beyond the flaccid sand and the draining branches, numbed Ransom's mind.

"The Captain will see you."

Ransom followed the man into the ship. The nautical terminology-there were some dozen captains, including Hendry, Jordan, and the Reverend Johnstone, a kind of ex officio rear-admiral-was a hangover from the first years when the nucleus of the original settlement had lived in the ship. The freighter sat where she had been sunk in the shallow water, the waves breaking her up, until the slopes of salt produced by the distillation units had driven the water back into the sea. At this stage thousands of emigrants were living in the cars and shacks on the beaches, and the distillation units, run by the citizens' cooperatives that had taken over from the military after the break-out battles, were each producing tons of salt every day. The large freighter had soon been inundated.

"Well, Charles, what have you brought now?" Seated at his desk in the purser's cabin, Hendry looked up as Ransom came in. Waving Ransom into a chair, he peered down the columns of an old leatherbound logbook that he used as a combined ledger and diary. In the intervening years the quiet humor had gone, and only the residue of the conscientious policeman remained. Dour and efficient, but so dedicated to securing the minimum subsistence level for the settlement that he could no longer visualize anything above that meager line, he summed up for Ransom all the dangers and confinements of their limbo.

"Judith sends her love, Captain," Ransom began. "How's the baby coming along?"

Hendry gestured vaguely with his pen. "As well as can be expected."

"Would you like some water for it? I have some outside. I was going to hand it over to the settlement, but I'd be delighted to give you and Julia the first cut."

Hendry glanced sharply at Ransom. "What water is this, Charles? I didn't know you had so much now you were giving it away."

"It isn't mine to give. The poachers were out again last night, stealing Jordan 's catch as it came in. I found this pool near the channel this morning."

Hendry stood up. "Let's have a look at it." He led the way out onto the deck. "Where is it? _That_ one down there?" Shaking his head, he started back for his cabin. "Charles, what are you playing at?"

Ransom caught up with him. "Judith and I have been talking it over seriously, Captain… it's been seffish of us living alone, but now we're prepared to join the settlement. You'll soon' need all the help you can get to bring in the sea."

"Charles…" Hendry hesitated. "We're not short of water."

"Perhaps that's true, in the immediate sense, but a year or two from now-we've got to think ahead."

Hendry nodded to himself. "That's good advice." He turned in the door to his cabin. For a moment the old Hendry glimmered faintly in his eyes. "Thanks for the offer of the water, Charles. Look, you wouldn't like it in the settlement, the people have given too much. If you came here, they'd drain you away."

Reflectively he patted the white carcass of a small shark hanging in the sun outside the cabin, the shriveled face gaping sightiessly at Ransom.

Resting on the rail, Ransom pulled himself together. Hendry's refusal meant that he was acting on some decision already reached by the other captains.

The look-out stood by the gangway, watching Ransom's tall gaunt figure move restlessly along the rail. Ransom went over to him. "Where's Captain Jordan? Is he here?"

The man shook his head. "He's over in the cliffs. He won't be back till evening."

Ransom looked back at the distant hills, debating whether to wait for Jordan. Almost every afternoon he went out to the hills above the beach, disappearing among the sand-dunes that spilled through the ravines. Ransom guessed that he was visiting the grave of his foster-father, Mr. Jordan. The old Negro had died a few days after their arrival at the beach, and Philip had buried him somewhere among the dunes.

As he stepped past the look-out, the man said softly: "Miss Vanessa wants to see you."

Nodding to the man, Ransom glanced up and down the silent hulk of the ship, and then crossed to the port side. The look-out's feet rang softly on the metal rails of the bridge, but otherwise this side of the ship was silent.

Ransom walked along the empty deck. A rusty companionway led to the boatdeck above. Most of the lifeboats had been smashed to splinters in the bombardment, but the line of officers' cabins was still intact. In one of these small cubicles behind the bridge, Vanessa Johnstone lived by herself.

Ransom reached the companionway, then stopped to glance through a damaged ventilator. Below was the central chamber of the ship. This long, high-ceilinged room had been formed when the floor dividing the passenger lounge from the dining room below had rusted out. It was now the Reverend Johnstone's combined vestry and throne-chamber.

A few oil-lamps flared from brackets on the wall, and cast a flickering submarine glow on to the ceiling, the shadows of the torn deck braces dancing like ragged spears. The floor of the chamber was covered with mats of dried kelp to keep out the cold. In the center, almost below Ransom, the Reverend Johnstone sat in an armchair mounted in the bow section of an old lifeboat, the very craft from which Johnstone had led the first assault on the freighter. The conchlike bowl, with its striped white timbers, was fastened to the small dais that had once been the bandstand. On the floor beside him were his daughters, Julia and Frances, with two or three other women, murmuring into their shawls and playing with a baby swaddled in rags of lace.

Looking down at the two daughters, Ransom found it difficult to believe that only ten years had elapsed since their arrival at the beach. Their faces had been puffed up by the endless diet of herring and fish-oil, and they had the thickened cheekbones and moon chins of Eskimo squaws. Sitting beside their father, shawls over their heads, they reminded Ransom of a pair of sleek, watchful madonnas. For some reason he was convinced that he owed his exclusion from the settlement to these two women. The proponents above all of the status quo, guardians and presiding angels of the dead time, perhaps they regarded him as a disruptive influence, someone who had preserved himself against the dunes and saltflats.

Certainly their senile father, the Reverend Johnstone, could now be discounted as an influence. Sitting like a stranded Neptune in the bowels of this saltlocked wreck, far out of sight of the sea, he drooled and wavered on his throne of blankets, clutching at his daughters' arms. He had been injured in the bombardment, and the right side of his face was pink and hairless. The gray beard tufting from his left cheek gave him the appearance of a demented Lear, grasping at the power he had given to his daughters. His head bobbed about, and Ransom guessed that for two or three years he had been almost blind. The confined world of the settlement was limited by his own narrowing vision, sinking into a rigid matriarchy dominated by his two daughters.

If any escape lay for Ransom, only the third daughter could provide it. As he reached the deserted boatdeck of the freighter, Ransom felt that the climb had carried him in all senses above the drab world of the settlement.

"Charles!" Vanessa Johnstone was lying in her bunk in the cold cabin, gazing at the gulls on the rail through the open door. Her black hair lay in a single coil on her white breast. Her plain face was as smooth and unmarked as when she sat by the window of her attic bedroom in Larchmont. Ransom closed the door and seated himself on the bunk beside her, tentatively taking her hands. She seized them tightly, greeting him with her slow smile. "Charles, you're here-"

"I came to see Hendry, Vanessa." She embraced his shoulders with her cold hands. Her blood always seemed chilled, but it ran with the quicksilver of time, its clear streams darting like the fish he had chased at dawn. The cold air in the cabin and her white skin, like the washed shells gleaming on the beaches in the bright winter sun, made his mind run again.

"Hendry-why?"

"I…" Ransom hesitated, frightened of at last committing himself to Vanessa. If she opened his way to the settlement he would be cast with her forever. "I want to bring Judith here and join the settlement. Hendry wasn't very keen."

"But, Charles-" Vanessa shook her head. "You can't come here. It's out of all question."

"Why?" Ransom took her wrists. "You both assume that. It's a matter of survival now. The sea is so far out-"

"The sea! Forget the sea!" Vanessa regarded Ransom with her somber eyes. "If you come here, Charles, it will be the end for you. All day you'll be raking the salt from the boilers."

Ransom turned away, and for a few moments gazed through the porthole. In a tired voice he asked: "What else is there, Vanessa?"

He waited as she lay back against the white pillow, the cold air in the cabin turning the black spirals of her hair. "Do you know, Vanessa?"

Her eyes were on the gulls high above the ship, picking at the body of the swordfish hanging from the mast below the whalebone cross.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13